Apple released Mac OS X Server 10.4.3 a couple days ago. The full details about the improvements are detailed in Apple KB#302089, but there's a few really nice bells and whistles in this update that might just make it the reason to upgrade your 10.3 servers. You can think of this article as a sort of "greatest hits" of the KB article.
Read on for more...
After looking at that long list from Apple's knowledge base on the updates in this release, it should be no surprise that this is Mac OS X Server's biggest update ever. This of course brings us to looking at some of the specific upgrades:
I'm sure to the delight of many readers, sieve has been addressed and now works right out of the box, as pointed out by Olivier Ducrot. Be aware that you need a /usr/sieve directory that belongs to cyrusimap user and add a sieve 2000/tcp # timsieved entry to /etc/services
One of the biggest things in 10.4.3 is that lookupd should be fixed now. If you were having system hangs under heavy SMB or rsync operations you should give 10.4.3 a try.
Managed client preferences now work on nested groups. This means that you can apply them to Active Directory groups for easy magic triangle deployments.
Unified file locking is working now. This is great to see, as it enables your Mac clients to connect to your server over AFP, your Windows clients to connect over SMB, and the file locking to work both cross-platform and cross-protocol.
Server Admin is now supposed to let you create a DNS entry for your domain. We haven't had a chance to test this one, so let us know in the comments if it's true.
There's been some reports of performance increases with Xsan 1.2 on this update for both client and server. We've not tested this yet either, so your millage may vary.
On the deployment front, Apple Software Restore's multicast client can now ask the server for missing blocks at the end of the first imaging pass. Previously if any blocks were missed that inline error correction could not correct, the client would need to loop through the entire image n times until it get's all the data. While it worked, it wasn't necessarily the fastest way of doing things! ASR also allows you to have a client side time out if it hasn't received any data from the stream in a number of seconds, and a server side reset that allows you to have the server stop streaming if there are no clients receiving data. This is cool as it will let you leave a mulitcast ASR server running without flooding your network with multicast traffic. There's more detail on implementing these features in the man pages, and a few more details on the macenterprise.org mailing list, with thanks to Mike Bombich for getting the word out.
And now for some really cool stuff. The login window has recieved some nice enhancements. If you weren't already aware, the Login Window already displayed the System Build, System Version, Host Name, Serial Number and Time - simply click on the Host Name (which is shown by default) and you can circle through these options - new to 10.4.3 are the IP Address (of the primary interface) and Network Account Status. The Network Account Status is the exciting part here, and provides the following information:
In addition to this, instead of having the Host Name as the default field on the login screen, you can now state your preference with a simple defaults write command:
Yet another feature now added onto the Login Window is the ability to set up a startup delay - many of us have found either startup items in 10.3.x or modified rc.boot for this in the past when we've needed to allow the system time to finish obtaining an IP Address via DHCP and for DS to bind to the servers. This is also done with defaults write:
Another spiffy upgrade is that the Weblog server can now publish podcasts, and Apple has a document on how to publish them for iTMS consideration here.
All in all, this is one update that all of us here are really pleased to see come out, and are very excited to deploy and continue to work with. Let us know in the comments below what it fixes, or doesn't fix, for you.
AFP548
Where the "desired field" is one of the following: HostName, SystemVersion, SystemBuild, SerialNumber, IPAddress, DSStatus, or Time.
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo <desired field>
If the Login Window UI detects that the network servers are available when it starts, it will skip the delay, also if network servers become available before the delay expires, the Login Window UI cancels the delay and displays. Thanks to Scott Barber for posting information on the macenterprise.org mailing list.
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow StartupDelay -int <number of seconds to delay>
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